Following is the story of our adoption of a much older child from the Waiting Child Program.  We had a unique situation in that we only had eight days to get to China once we said “yes.” Most of the story is about the time leading up to our trip.  The full version was originally published to our blog:  http://twototsandateen.blogspot.com/.

On December 16, 2008, I received the following in an email about a young lady about to turn 14. It was a “Waiting Child Update” from GWCA.  I hardly ever read these emails.  We were waiting for our third, non-special needs baby from China.  Our dossier was logged in at the China Center of Adoption Affairs (CCAA) on May 14, 2007.  We had years to go and quite honestly, we were fine with the ever-lengthening wait for our third child.  We had our hands full with the two girls we already had.

“Good morning,

We are asking for your help in finding a home for a beautiful girl from the Shared Agency List.

We have a young lady who only a month away from her 14th birthday on January 20th. If a family has not come to adopt her before her birthday, she will remain in the orphanage until she reaches the age of independence. We ask that you please review some of her information and to contact us immediately if you feel this young lady may be a good fit within your family. We know several people who have personally met her and are hopeful she will find her family.

Any family that comes forward for her MUST have a current, valid I-171H and be willing and ready to travel to China to complete the provincial paperwork for her adoption prior to her birthday.

Chang is diagnosed with mild cerebral palsy. … When she came to the orphanage [at an estimated age of four], she could not walk or function very well at all. Through the determination of the therapists and the orphanage, along with Chang’s own strong will to succeed, she has come very far in her physical abilities. She was able to walk at the age of seven and has been dedicated to participating in her therapies. She is now able to walk, run, jump and climb.

Teachers often praise her in school. She is interested in English. She studies hard even though she is not good at it, because she wants to be adopted by a foreign family. She is also a very good artist. She likes to play hide and seek, see-saw an ride bikes with children of her age. She also loves to dance. In the “June 1” celebration in 2008 she participated in the “fashion show” with other children and was well received. She is very shy and keeps silent when she sees strangers, but she is very talkative with her friends. She only communicates with adults she is close to. She is very eager to be in a family and wants to have her own family just like other adopted children; to be loved by a father and mother.

Please contact us immediately if you feel you might be able to open your home and heart to being Chang’s parents. ”

I emailed Eddie and asked him if he wanted to adopt a teen. I went on with my day and the phone rang. It was Eddie. He said “sure.” I said “sure what?” He said “sure, we can adopt her.” Okay… I wasn’t expecting that.

I called GWCA to tell them that we had the crazy idea that maybe, just maybe, we would like to adopt her. They sent us her file and I read it and sent it to Eddie to review. We talked back and forth on the phone all day. I talked to the GWCA representative several times. I stared at Sarah’s pictures quite a bit. I thought she was just beautiful.

That evening, our family went out to eat. We talked about her while we ate. In code, of course, so the little girls wouldn’t know we were discussing a possible new sister. After we got home and put the girls to bed, Eddie and I sat down by the Christmas tree and had a chat.

We prayed all day about adopting this child. We agonized about how we held her future in our hands at that moment. We talked about our little girls and what this could do to them.  After much discussion, we finally made the decision that we should not move forward with her adoption.

I was crushed. I cried for two days. It tore me up. I never wanted to experience another day like December 16 for as long as I lived. I was heartbroken for this child I’d never even met. Sure, lots and lots of kids age-out of the “system.” They just don’t all come through my email first and grab my heart as they pass by.

We immediately started praying that a family would come forward to adopt her. Little did we know…

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We made it through a quiet Christmas season. We put the idea of adopting Fu Chang behind us and tried to go on with our lives. We still thought about her from time to time. We wondered if anyone had come forward to adopt her.

On December 30, 2008, I received another Waiting Child Update from GWCA.

“Good afternoon,

We have asked several times for a family willing to come forward for Chang, one of our kiddos on the Shared Agency list, who will be turning 14 on January 20th. We recently received an update from Love Without Boundaries from her orphanage. They say that Chang is an extremely sweet and gentle girl, and she has watched all of her friends in the orphanage find families. The orphanage said she is “heart struck” because she wants a family so very much. The orphanage has agreed to waive the $5000 orphanage donation if a family is able to travel to adopt her before her birthday. Please reread the information below about Chang and let us know immediately if you are willing to open your heart to her. …”

I noticed the orphanage fee had been waived. I called Eddie and told him. We discussed how this would make it a bit easier to travel to China on such short notice, even though the high cost was not our first hesitation. We also discussed (and still do to this day) how there must be something really special about Sarah for the orphanage to waive their fee. They were not trying to get rid of her. They were trying to give her an opportunity in life. It is extremely rare for an orphanage fee to be waived.

I emailed GWCA and told them we would like to reconsider adopting this child. So we were at it again, on the phone all day, getting nothing else done. I must have called GWCA 10+ times. We were still praying for a solid answer to this situation. I was not getting an answer this time around.

I really wanted to talk to some people who had actually met Sarah. GWCA gave us the number of the family who adopted her friend a couple of months earlier. They also called Amy E of Love Without Boundaries and then gave me her number. I contacted Sarah’s friend’s mom and talked to her. They told me she was a very sweet girl. (Now, I might have my timeline a bit out of order, but I’m pretty sure I spoke to this mom on this day and not the first time around…)

Anyway, talking to a family who met her once was great. But, I still had concerns about how she would fit in our family. We had to consider our existing children. An orphan child can be on her absolute best behavior when families come to visit the orphanage. I needed to know more about her daily behavior. I needed to know about her temperament and personality.

I tried to reach Amy E that evening to no avail. In the meantime, even though we had not “locked” Sarah’s file, we were off to the drug store to get passport photos for various purposes. That was a really weird feeling. We had not decided to adopt Sarah, but we were going through the motions to do so.

The next morning, Amy E. of LWB called.  I spoke with her for a long time. She listened to my concerns. She told me what she knew about Sarah. I was pleased with her report. I called Eddie and relayed the information to him. Like me, Eddie was waiting to hear a first-hand report on Sarah. This was all he needed to hear and he was ready to move forward.

During one of my calls with GWCA that morning, I found out that the CCAA required us to be in province on January 11, 2009. This meant that we would have to leave a week or so earlier than we thought. Well, that settled that, I thought. There was no way in the world we could get to China that fast. Quinn did not have a passport and I was not going to leave her here.

We started counting the days and decided we could go all sorts of expedited routes to get a passport for Quinn. Of course, we needed a flight reservation to get an expedited passport at the local passport center. To get our flight reservations, we would need to decide for sure if we were going to adopt Sarah. And then, the passport center website said it could take up to two weeks to process a passport. We decided to take that chance.

On December 31, 2008, I called GWCA and locked Fu Chang’s file. Then the fun began.

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Before I go on with the story, I have to back up and share something about our I171H (the document that shows we have USCIS approval to bring a child back to the US).

Our I171H was set to expire in October, 2008. We discussed the pros and cons of renewing it or letting it expire. At the same time, we were waiting to find out if we would get a free renewal of this document. That’s what made it hard to decide to renew or not. If we renewed, it would cost hundreds of dollars. If we let it expire, we would fall under the Hague Convention and then it would cost a lot more money years down the road to have a new home study done when it came closer to time for our referral.

Once we received word that we were granted the one-time free extension, we decided to go ahead and renew. We received our fingerprint letter and it said we had 84 days to have our prints done. Eighty-four days was a long time, so we didn’t rush. We were busy with life and figured we would get it done when we could. Besides, Eddie was incredibly busy at work, making up for time missed due to Hurricane Ike and it would be hard for him to miss work for this. Eighty-four days fell after his new tax deadline in early January. We planned to get our prints done after that tax deadline, just before the 84 days were up. We would be just fine. We had plenty of time…

On December 8, I received an email from the adoption officer at the Houston USCIS office. It is not common for this office to contact applicants directly, so I became nervous when I saw the email. The officer asked me if we were planning to have our fingerprints done any time soon. I responded to the officer and said that our letter stated we had 84 days to get our prints done but we would go ahead and get printed anyway. We assumed this person wanted to get our file off of her desk. We had our fingerprints done within the next few days.

If this officer had not emailed me to prompt us to get our fingerprints done, we would not have Sarah today. We would not have been I171H-ready when we first learned about her. Eighty-four days fell on January 16, 2009, four days before her 14th birthday.

We received our renewed I171H just in time to take it to China.

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After we accepted Sarah’s referral and her file was locked, I immediately started doing paperwork. Due to the urgent nature of her adoption, we had so little time to get everything ready for our trip. We had one week to accomplish what usually takes six to eight weeks. In other words, for our first two adoptions, we had about that much time between referral and travel. I think some of the paperwork I’ll describe later usually takes months to complete. This was our first waiting child / special needs adoption and it is a different process from the non-special needs process for our first two adoptions.

It was December 31 so we were only able to purchase our airline tickets and reserve hotels and trains for the Hong Kong part of our trip. We had to wait until Friday, January 2 to get started on Quinn’s passport and everyone else’s China visas. We are fortunate that both of those offices are local. We planned to go first thing that morning to the passport office to get the process started for Quinn’s passport. Then Eddie would go to work and the girls and I would head on over to the Chinese consulate and order our visas. We planned to get the three visas on expedited service and then go back during the next week with Quinn’s passport to get a same-day visa for Quinn, hoping that they would honor our request.

I was nervous at the window. The guy looked at all of Quinn’s papers. We did not have a Texas birth certificate for her, so I was worried there might be a problem.  He sent us to the next window. We handed this next guy our paperwork and held Quinn up so he could see her. I casually mentioned why we were going to China. Then I asked how long it would take to get her passport. Remember, the website said it could take up to two weeks doing it this way. He said “oh, I’m going to give it to you today.” I didn’t know whether to cry or to pass out. I looked at Eddie and then looked back at the officer and said “thank you so much, you don’t know what this means.” He jokingly said he only does one good deed a day and this was it.  Three hours later we had a US passport for Quinn.

Next the girls and I went to the Chinese consulate with all four passports. I went to the window and turned in our applications and asked how long it would take. I read something on their website that it is up to them if they want to give expedited service. The lady said “Monday.” That’s pretty much next-day service in my opinion.

During all this time, there were two ladies at GWCA who were working very hard and very long hours on our adoption. I must have called them a hundred times before this was all said and done.  These wonderful ladies were up late at night to correspond with their China office. Several times I thought that if we had just accepted Sarah’s referral back on December 16, it would have not been so crazy to get us to China that fast. Well, I have since realized that if we had accepted her referral back then, the $5000 orphanage donation would not have been waived yet. So it all worked out the way it was supposed to.

Anyway, GWCA told us that someone from their Beijing office would walk over to the CCAA and get our papers in place for the adoption. Everything had been verbally confirmed beforehand. This would take place on Monday morning, January 5, 2009, China time. That meant we were to wait up Sunday night to check our email for the Letter Seeking Confirmation from Adopter (LSC). I think this is also called the LOA.

So, Monday morning in China, our dossier was pulled from a stack waiting for review. Our dossier went through review, matching, referral and then on to travel for our travel approval in one morning. For those of you not currently in the China adoption process, this is a big deal. I really don’t know the exact time lines of a waiting-child dossier, but I’ve heard it usually takes months for all of these steps to be completed. Sunday evening, we received an email with our LSC, printed it out, signed it, scanned it and emailed it back. We were on our way to China.

We had less than one week to get ready to go.  I did all of the running around on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and packing on Thursday. I remember packing for a month with the other adoption trips. This was crazy! I helped that we were not adopting a baby, so we didn’t need diapers, bottles, baby clothes, etc. We just brought a few things for Sarah and planned to supplement while we were there.

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Fast forward to the day we met Sarah.  We suspected then and we know now that even though she really wanted a family, she was terrified when she met us.  There was some miscommunication that day between her escort, our guide and us and for a moment we thought she had a “mental disease” and a “heart condition.”  What they meant was cerebral palsy and a broken heart due to remembering her abandonment.  Once we got all of that cleared up, we were ready to proceed.

During the time we were in China, it did seem that Sarah wanted to get away from us.  We gave her some space and let her process and grieve the situation.  She says now that she thought we would pick her up the day we met and go straight home.  She really wanted to get home!

Sarah is thriving in our family.  She is a sweet, kind, caring, loving young girl.  She has picked up English at an amazing rate.  She seems to be a very smart girl.  From the time we got home, it was very clear that she wanted to be a part of our family.

This is not to say that everything is always perfect.  This has been the hardest work ever.  Sarah received no education in China and that has been quite a challenge.  She had no social skills (of course) and we are trying to gently correct years of observed behavior from living in the special needs section of an orphanage environment.  She came into our family with top dog, pack mentality.  Her food issues are off the chart and she hoards her belongings.  She tends to be quite uncooperative when it comes to medical care. 

BUT, there is no doubt in our minds that she was meant to be our child. We felt a very strong call from the beginning to adopt her. It is something I cannot explain to most people. You should see the looks we get!  As I told one person who was very surprised to find out we added such an older child to our family:  it was not what we were planning to do, it was what we were called to do. And we could not ignore that call.